Received a canned response:

There appears to have been an incident involving capacity issues within
our delivery infrastructure. The error message "451 Message temporarily
deferred - 4.16.50" indicates that our MTAs are currently experiencing
heavy, unusual traffic. You may retry sending at a later time when you
see this message.

However please note that emails from the mail server(s) you are using
may also have recently become deprioritized due to potential issues with
its mailings.

These deprioritizations were temporary but may be re-triggered if the
sending IP profile continues to be poor. Typically, deprioritizations
are triggered by bad individual sender or MAIL FROM profiles.

The following link contains information on maintaining prioritized
delivery when sending to Yahoo! users.


http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/spam/spam-18.html

Please also refer to the Help page below for more information on our
recommended best practices for bulk mailers. At the bottom of the Help
page is a link to a feedback form where you can contact our Customer
Care team to apply for possible whitelisting.

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/bulk/bulk-01.html

If you are not the administrator for the mail server(s) affected, we
encourage you to contact the administrator so they can address the
possible issues regarding mailings from the mail server.

If you notice any further difficulties with delivering to Yahoo! Mail
accounts after waiting a reasonable amount of time, please let us know
by replying directly to this email.

It´s interesting to note that yahoo is now censoring their message boards with regards to this issue. Yesterday I Googled for "451 Message temporarily deferred yahoo" and today, serveral of threads on Yahoo´s message boards have now been deleted. They were mostly from concerned legitimate users who were wondering why their e-mail were being delayed by hours if not days. Interesting

All my mail servers are having this issue, we are trying to do retries to reconnect to yahoo every 1min and still we used to get 100K mail and now barely 20K.

I am just curious how effective domain keys were for you?

can´t believe that yahoo is so stupid.

If they said that this 451 is due heavy traffic, why an e-mail from Gmail get´s delivered?

Nah, it´s some kind of stupid anti-spam tweak

All my servers are having the same issues as well. Used to get great delivery, and now barely anything. Would DomainKeys actually help since the servers are rejecting upon connect? (since the domain key looked up is based on selector in the message header, which doesn´t even get sent). I too noticed that a few recently asked questions cached in google are now deleted on yahoo´s system. Sigh.

Mark, DomainKeys seemed to increase the "chances" of going through. After installing DomainKeys we got a lot of messages (compared to none before) to go through, but then all of a sudden they started being sporadically blocked again. We do know that the DomainKeys is working because test emails that did go through show a "DomainKeys verified that this email came from domain.com".

Terry, as noted, DomainKeys seems to be helping. I would love to hear more stories from others, but only have our experience to work from.

For any of you that think that this is a "limited" case or you are the only one, I´ve already had over 130 hits from Google in the last 24 hours from people searching for information about this very issue.

Ahhh.good to know we´re not the only ones. I´ve been fighting this for a couple days now (mainly by shortening the reconnect time).

We are going to run some domainkey tests today I will let everyone know how it goes.

Thanks for the info. I first noticed this last Friday and it was sporadic then. I originally thought Yahoo was having DNS issues or disappearing server problems again. Yesterday and today none of my users email is getting through to Yahoo. Filled out the Yahoo form http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-01.html and will wait to see what happens.

I expect this delivery problem will get worse with other providers as the spam problem increases. I have seen a huge spam jump in the last month or so. I have about 2,000 users and yesterday my filters blocked 42,909 spam emails.

simply stupid move blocking more good mails than spam mails

We had added domain keys starting yesterday and it has help a lot. It improved our delivery rate and connections to yahoo also improved 20x compare to when we were not using domain keys, We were still getting the 451 error but overall a large improvement. I submitted 2 tickets with yahoo over the past week and half and still have not heard anything back from them. Until then this is a good solution to this issue. I will update with anything else I can find.

I have experienced this issue since 10/19. I had DomainKeys setup for months now. It doesn´t improve anything from what I can tell on my end. All my Emails do eventually go through (after many attempts) however everything now goes to the Spam folder no matter what user on my domain sends an Email. I sent a Email to Yahoo and received the same canned reply about capacity issues and to fill out the whitelist request form. I did that on Wednesday, but have not yet received a reply. I actually submitted the whitelist form several months ago (in May) and was told I would now have delivery to the inbox. Obviously, I am not whitelisted.

On a side note, I also noticed that my Emails per day received on my Yahoo account are much less. Also, the admin on a Yahoo Freecycle group posted today they saw over 500 address bouncing! It seems this issue is impacting Yahoo´s own services as well. Will this ever be fixed?

Of course their mail servers are having capacity issues. These two explinations are not mutually exclusive. If you block the first attempt at delivery of each message, most legit servers will try again, and again, and again. They must be processing a increased TCP/SMTP connection load that is an order of magnitude larger then before this alledged new policy. Add in DNS lookups, RBL lookups, manual block lookups, you get the point.

Yahoo, please wake up. Unfortunately, you are simply pissing off our end users and giving yourself a black eye in the community. If this keeps up, I might have to start rejecting any mail from my users destined to Yahoo because the queuing on my servers is getting out of hand.

We´ve moved most of our freelance employee´s away from their yahoo.com accounts. (They have a high incentive because work is on a first-come-first serve basis.

It´s tricker with clients to try and explain why our e-mails are delayed by many hours and are ending up in their junk mail folder. Several have told me that they no longer have the option of coding our e-mails as ´HAM´ to avoid it going into the junk folder.

I´m already starting to code a PHP solution in our sign-up area to warn potential customers about the problem and ´gently´ suggest they use a non-yahoo.com e-mail address with our service (which is time sensitive.)

I´m not sold on the idea that this is a greylisting, maybe a failed greylisting attempt, but not a successful one. Greylisting isn´t suppose to reject messages for over 24 hours. To test this, I sent a test message from a server that is afflicted with this problem at 11:56AM yesterday (Oct 27). It is now 7:56PM (Oct 28). The message still has not been delivered, it is still sitting on the sending server waiting to be delivered. I don´t see this qualifying as greylisting. More like just a block on the IP.

Surprisingly we have not had any clients that have noticed this, but I expect that to change at any moment. At which point the only thing I can tell clients is that if you use Yahoo for e-mail, there´s no telling how much e-mail you are not getting. Hope they don´t have anything important going there.

Hello, We are not able to send mail to any of the yahoo accounts from our server. The ip of the server is X.X.X.X. It seems the ip is blacklisted at your end. We are getting the following error:
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host mx2.mail.yahoo.com [4.79.181.136]: 451 Message temporarily deferred - 4.16.50

Please look into this and do the needful at the earliest. None of our customers are able to send mail to any of the yahoo accounts. Looking forward for your reply.

Well I got domain keys up and running on one of our servers. I´m running a server w/ domain keys and one w/o to see the differences. So far, I haven´t noticed anything better about delivery rate/performance of the DK one over the non DK one (and yeah, I verified the DK´s are working the email headers all say (pass) on yahoo´s side).

On another note, I have noticed that overall the past few days have been much better then the last week or so. Overall delivery rates are up, not as good as they were, but significantly better then when this blog was posted. But again, the DK and Non-DK servers are performing about the same.

WebBuzz, We are not Yahoo. We are just people that have the same concerns about the email issue at Yahoo. (I hope that your post was an email sent to an official Yahoo representative.) I also hope that you get a better response instead of the standard "a customer care representative will contact you within 48 hours."

Terry, thank you for your A\B Test. I´ve had the same experience as Mark where we have had a much better response since installing DomainKeys (who knows if it is just the date coincidence or not). Out of curiosity, are both servers sending on the same IP address? Are both servers sending for the same domains? Is your key set up with o=~ or o=-?

Thank you again to all who have posted about this issue. Hopefully this will help be a repository of help to those that are having these same problems.

Interesting to note that Goodmail Systems just announced (Oct 26) that "In an effort to combat the effects of phishing and spam, Goodmail Systems today announced plans to deploy its Goodmail(TM) CertifiedEmail service with America Online, Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., the leading global providers of email services." (Note you can get a not-so-free-trial (because of the non-refundable $399) supposedly to make sure that your mail goes through to their inbox instead of the spam box because it bypasses the spam detection.

"Yahoo! is committed to protecting the inbox. In working with Goodmail, we are continuing our multi-faceted approach to ensure our users have a safer and more secure email experience through the use of enhanced technologies. Goodmail´s CertifiedEmail service will be a fine complement to the safeguards we already have in place including SpamGuard and DomainKeys," said Andy Spillane, vice president of Yahoo! Mail.

Just another plug for installing DomainKeys.

Wow, thank you for this very helpful article! We´ve been in touch with Yahoo for over a week trying to get this resolved, to no avail. They are impossible to deal with! It´s good to know that we aren´t the only ones dealing with this! Thanks for the info!

I have the same problem, thank you all, I´ve been told by some Yahoo users that during last 2 weeks they have been geeting a lot of spam, sounds like Yahoo is too busy dealing with its own problems.

all my emails sent to yahoo account holders are being bounced in the last week.Why?

I work at a University and we are having major yahoo delivery issues that started around the 26th. We are getting the 451 - 4.16.50. This site has been very informative on this problem. I have tried changing my re-delivery rate within our MT in an attempt to get mail through. After that didn´t work, I tried connecting to the yahoo mail servers using telnet to port 25. What I found out is we are being blocked when we try to connect. It is the same 451 - 4.15.50. It would seem if it was greylisting, that we wouldn´t be blocked from connecting. How can it check for the normal grey list "triplets" if I don´t connect and send data? I can not connect using telnet from our outbound server. I did verify that I can connect (to Yahoo) using another server within our domain and I can send mail through that connection. It seems that we are blacklisted, or have a lower priority at the IP level. That makes me wonder if the Domain Keys would help in our situation, since we can´t get a connect at the front end. I have used yahoo´s "form" and hopefully we will get a response. We are on our 5th day of not being able to deliver to yahoo, and we have over 3000 messages in our queue for yahoo. Our expire period on our queue is 1 day, so that is around 1 days worth of messages. It would seem if they have us at a lower priority that some messages would get through. I will post here if I get a response from Yahoo from my support request. Seems like the success rate is low for that.

Is anyone else that is having troubles being blocked from smtp on yahoo´s servers at connect? I am wondering if there is more than one issue for the delivery issues with yahoo. Perhaps greylisting and some form of blacklisting or service denial based on some kind of algorithim.

Ray, We had the same problem with "automatic" denial when trying to connect via telnet. We tried every one of the ips listed in their dns records. We were able to connect once to the server, and then immediately received the same 451 -4.16.50 error when we tried to connect the second time to that same IP.
We feel your pain of having extremely large queues of messages that wouldn´t go. However, we did have success once we installed domainkeys on being able to get connections (we´re not sure if we finally came off the "greylist" and then one email that went through was seen with the domainkey information and the strangle hold that was on the ip was loosened a bit). All I know is that it has helped.
However, domainkeys still didn´t solve "every" problem. We decided to switch sending/receiving IPs for some of our domains and see if that helps with delivery.

I really don´t understand how installing DomainKeys can help, since you get a rejection before you even present the name of your host. The only thing yahoo can have to go on at that point is the reverse DNS of your IP address, which may not be the domain that your domain key is on. I guess they could keep track of which IP addresses presented "signed" email in the past?

Wow, very interesting. So it appears that yahoo´s servers greylist you by default, but when you start sending good mail to them they _ungreylist_ your IP address! All I had to do was send one good email and suddenly my connection rate was 100!

.now I see how domain keys help, because they tend to make yahoo think mail coming from your IP address is good. Of course, if you get on their bad side, you´re going to get lots of rejected connections.

Hope this helps others.

Here´s the solution as I see it. Stop using yahoo mail there´s plenty of other free email offerings. I can smell the end of yahoo coming soon.

Well we are up to 2,274 unique searchers looking for information on this problem. Insane. No wonder Yahoo can´t respond. They´ve gone and made everyone mad.

This issue is that Yahoo is not following the RFC2821 for sending email.
Specific sequences are:

CONNECTION ESTABLISHMENT
S: 220
E: 554
EHLO or HELO
S: 250
E: 504, 550
MAIL
S: 250
E: 552, 451, 452, 550, 553, 503

The 451 error should not be given until after the Mail From command is issued. As you can see, no temporary error can be issued until after the Mail From command is issued.

I have not been getting my mail the last week I don´t know what is going on

This may not help everyone, but in testing I found that the FROM address does make a difference. Yahoo was blocking all email when we used a FROM address of our tech support account. When we tested using a completely different FROM address and domain name then Yahoo accepted the email. This is not related to SPF either. They just seem to be blocking email from certain addresses.

we are having same problem, as soon as our server connects to a yahoo MX , it kicks out that ´temp. defered´ message and hangs up. as a result our mailq gets total backed up and jamms up the rest of my network. i´ve have been forced to filter out all yahoo email address from my system just so i can send out my email´s to everyone else!!!

THAT SUKS !

Same issues on our end. Started on the 16th. They bounced back all messages, which clogged our email queue. They did this to all 3 of our mail servers. We contacted them 3 x´s with nothing but canned responses in return. Then yesterday they started delivering messages again and we got excited but today they are yet again bouncing back our messages. We now have notes on all yahoo member accounts informing them we can´t guarantee delivery and incouraging them to open up another non-yahoo email account. This is bad for yahoo. Wonder how fast their member base will drop off?

The message should be 421 not 451. Servers see 421 and try again later. They see 451 and bounce. Yahoo didn´t follow the RFC. I just put in an SMTP proxy to grey list and it works perfectly using 421

This is not greylisting. Just use telnet to test, you will know the 451 deferred error is in GREETINGS! It disconnects your connection in GREETINGS.

How do we install DomainKeys with SmarterMail?

This doesn´t make any sense. It´s like Yahoo´s mail servers are picking and choosing which emails to accept, and when.

Example. I´m using cPanel, and viewing emails via Mail Queue Manager. Aside from the thousands of Yahoo emails sitting there, there is a particular ´good´ yahoo.com address that I know is valid.

If I try to force the delivery of that email, it may or may not go through the first time. If it doesn´t. I try it again (within seconds of getting the deferred error). If I get the error again, I try once more. Ususually within 3-tries of manually trying to re-queue the email, it goes through -- and there´s not telling which of the mail servers it will send trough. sometime´s it´s the first. sometime´s it´s the last on the list.

Needless to say this is no way for Yahoo to conduct business, and as many others have said this is cutting into HOURS of work on our end trying to ´troubleshoot´ as well as dealing with customer support questions as to why Grandma isn´t getting pictures of her grandbaby.

THANKS YAHOO!!!!

Greylisting actually does work. Spammers don´t bother to retry, because what´s the point? Better to use that time to try a new email address from their endless list, than to try to keep track of which tens of thousands of the their tens of millions of emails have been deferred and need to be retried. Retrying makes spamming take up significantly more resources, and is just not worth it because they don´t care whether a specific email gets through, just that a large number do.

What Yahoo is doing is completely broken, though. If their intent is to greylist, it´s not working. They´re giving me 451´s almost every time my servers try to connect - before even the EHLO. A sensible greylist (like the one I run on my own server) keeps track of the greylisted attempts, and when they try a second time, lets them through - and puts them on a whitelist for the future. That way, each sender/recipient pair only gets greylisted once, and that first email only gets deferred for one retry interval.

In addition to pointlessly deferring almost every connection every time, Yahoo is also completely inaccessible. I´ve submitted reports and requests on their web forms twice in the last week and gotten no response, and spent several hours calling their support number and corporate offices and whatnot, hitting complete dead ends.

Yahoo is an insane and offensive company. I´m not gonna bother trying to deal with them anymore, I´m just going to advise anyone I know who uses them to stop.

This is specific to the mail you are sending and is a specific block on you and the content of the message. the 4.16.50 is used in cases when they are de-prioritizing mail. Typically, this is because the mail you are attempting to send is getting too many complaints from users.

Installing Domain Keys will not have any effect on this. Only lowering your complaint rates will.

I am with a company that assists people in finding housing.The customer logs on to our website requesting information. Unfortunately we can not help any yahoo customers suddenly because our emails with important REQUESTED information are not being delivered to them. We have been recommending our customers set up new email accounts with hotmail,msn etc so they can recieve ours many other emails they may never receive due to Yahoo´s new spam policy.

No, we´re not greylisting (by most definitions of the word.)

Cos, thanks for those comments. You are absolutely correct that they blocking based on IP address before they even get the EHLO or HELO. I will probably modify the post to read "deprioritized" where we have "greylisting" above. Although it is greylistesque, it would probably be more accurately "extreme deprioritization".

Laura, unfortunately this blocking is not done on a "per-email" basis. We found that only by adding DomainKeys to every domain on the IP helped. At least our emails are going through better than most now.

If this issue is the result of Yahoo´s implimentation of greylisting, they´re
doing it all wrong. Greylisting is supposed to block mail from
non-mailservers. It´s supposed to be nearly invisible to and not affect
mail from real mailservers (only minor delays should be seen).

Looks like they´ve changed up their message upon connect:

Connecting to mx2.mail.yahoo.com [67.28.113.72]:25 . connected
SMTP> QUIT
LOG: MAIN
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host mx2.mail.yahoo.com [67.28.113.72]: 421 Message from (XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html

Yahoo has published the following help topics about this:
Why am I getting “451 Message temporarily deferred” errors when sending mail to Yahoo!?
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
AND
Does Yahoo! use "greylisting" to reject messages?
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-07.html

Wow, did we get Yahoo´s attention or what.?

The official word is that "Yahoo! does not utilize [greylisting], and we have no intention of doing so in the future -- no matter what you may read on some random blog."

I guess we are that "random blog." Matt thanks for pointing out their "new" connection process and rejection notice (Namely a 421 instead of a 451). It is nice of them to listen to the comments made here and start following the RFC a little more closely. At least we are getting some feedback from Yahoo (even if it is in an indirect route) and hopefully will get better connections from now on.

Dear Yahoo!,



This is regarding your new email blocking policy that launched in mid October this year. I have many friends, customers, and colleagues that I have been in contact with for years that have Yahoo.com email addresses. Now all of the sudden they are not receiving my legitimate emails. This has hurt my business and my communications with friends. My colleagues using your mail system have expressed frustrations because they cannot receive my updates and communications on important subjects. I would like to request that you adjust your blocking strategy instead of blocking so many legitimate emails.



Sincerely,

Don Frye

In working a problem with a throttling smart-host, I had to disable all outbound mail for about 30 minutes. (Getting rid of a huge spam load that was redirected to AOL, YAHOO, and other big-vendor mail systems.) Interestingly, when I put the server back on-line, Yahoo! started accepting mail from it. This was after doing the 451/421 thing on every message before that. Now, cleaning out spam identifiable by subject may have helped. But I´m wondering if the hiatis had any contribution to the sudden acceptance of mail. By the way, throttling the mail to Yahoo seems to help. I try to limit my smart-host server to sending four mails at a time to any yahoo.(com|net) e-mail address.

Well, after having these problems for a week or two, things seem to be much better for us now.

We changed two things:
1 - We submitted Yahoo´s problem form, as has been mentioned here.
2 - We upped the retry interval on our mail server from 15 minutes to 1 minute.

We´re now seeing much more descriptive (and believable) "421 - Resources temporarily unavailable" errors. This stalls the mail for a bit but it is definitely getting through. Let´s keep our fingers crossed.

We are having the same problem, has anyone tried the 24.99 incident resolution at:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/payforcare/payforcare-01.html
If so, did this help or was it a waste?

A thousand thanks for researching the problem and explaining it in a way that makes sense to nontechnical folks. I´m encouraging all my friends who use Yahooooooooo to switch to Gmail, and move our discussion lists over to Google Groups. Enough is enough!

[Guilherme made this comment on October 25, 2006
can�'t believe that yahoo is so stupid.]

I can.

Either Yahoo! stopped using this method, or the spammers have gotten past and others haven´t. I get on everyday with 10 new spam messages, when last month it was about 3-4. Why must Yahoo! do things like this?

I just noticed the MX records for Yahoo are different now. Are they possibly fixing the issue? I noticed my Emails now are so-so. Some still end up in bulk, but now some are hitting the inbox too. I hope its fixed soon. =\

I have been having the same problems, but now seem to get alot of bounces for yahoo.co.in (India). Does anyone else get these, and are they using the same filtering, or are they a seperate entity from yahoo.com.

Hi all--

Give this a shot:

connect/send 5 messages/disconnectrepeat.

This may slow your throughput a bit, but Yahoo is accepting mail without throwing the 421´s using this technique.

A little birdy told me that this is Yahoo´s new sweet spot.

It is ridiculous that there is no way to get in touch with their support. I´ve been working on getting someone on the phone for almost two weeks. Even AOL has a way to speak to a postmaster!!

well done ahfx.net,

They obviously have not fix´d the problem I had a conversation with Yahoo and they acknowledged "a" problem and said they would fix it some how in a day or two. So it is still a problem.

A 451/421 response is neither a rejection nor an error. A correctly functioning mail server will resend the message in 1-12 minutes after receiving a 451 response. Any mail server that doesn´t is either malfunctioning or simply failing to follow the RFC´s. Don´t blame Yahoo, blame your ISP if their mail server is reporting your email as failing to get through.

Tony, I agree, to a degree. However, if Yahoo continues to give the 421/451 error every single time you connect (5 different times after 5/10/15/30/3600 minutes), then they are not "temporarily deferring" your mail. They are flat out rejecting it. (Normally due to a deprioritization of your ip address for those hundreds of sites that reside on a shared ip.)

I´m the chief admin of an ISP that has run grey. I mean, "deprioritizing" (heh heh) for the last year. greylist-milter if you are curious. It is highly effective. very highly effective. So high that unless you ran it you wouldn´t believe the statistics so I won´t bother posting them.
It is true, however, that there are some mailservers out there that have problems with sending to a greylist. We get about 1 notification every couple of months from a user regarding mail problems that turns out to require an exception to be put into the greylist config. Any admin worth their salt that understands how to read a mail log can see when it´s appropriate to make such a correction.
If Yahoo isn´t making these exeptions when contacted, they are simply not managing the tool properly. There is no value to greylisting a known legitimate mailserver.
Ironically, Yahoo itself uses a pool of mailservers for outbound SMTP that has a problem with sending to a greylisting mailserver, so we have to list Yahoo´s mailserver subnets in our own greylist exception list.
I am extremely glad to see Yahoo using this tool now because I am sick and tired of listening to carping from administrators who are running non-RFC compliant mailservers that have problems sending to us, and carping from users who don´t understand mail standards, and just because they are unfamiliar with greylisting, think it´s a bad thing. It is not bad. Like any tool it can be misused, and configured wrong. But when properly used and configured it is the best tool out there against spammers right now. And, the only way it can be defeated is for spammers to reduce their transmission rates, which will put a lot of them out of business. When a spammer only gets a 0.0000000001 response rate on his spam scams, he cannot manage it when a tool comes along that requires him to increase his per-spam processing time by a hundred thousandfold. (these figures are probably not exact but I think you get the idea)
Sure we are always going to have some spam, the most determined spammer will make it through any filter no matter what. But, right now the simple fact is that it´s easier and less risky to make a dollar spamming than to make a dollar doing legitimate work, that´s why so many people are spamming. It´s within our capabilities to reverse this, to make earning a dollar spamming far more difficult than earning a dollar working at McDonalds, and once we get to this point then most of the spammers will go back to whatever greasy spoons they were working at before they decided to start making a living spamming. Greylisting is a step in the path to get back to this point, and the fact that Yahoo has figured this out gives me a lot of hope that we are near the end of the uncontrolled spam era.

Tony,
>A correctly functioning mail server will resend the message in 1-12 minutes after receiving a 451 response.
The problem is, I (and my clients) aren´t receiving these bounces back from Yahoo until perhaps 2 or even 3 days after the original mail was sent. No one on my network can send to a Yahoo address anymore, period.

I get loads of complaints from my clients that the emails they send to Yahoo email addresses are very delayed if they ever come through.
I have constantly emails in the mail queue, all to yahoo :(
Hope they´ll do something SOON

Just thought that I would update this, since this was one of the few places that I found some information to get me started.
Here is what has happened and is recommended
Yahoo implemented several MTA changes in Oct. ´06 and one of them was to limit the max. amount of messages per connection to 5. This threshold applies to all senders and there is currently no way around this measure--even for whitelisted senders/IPs. The result of this is that if you have 100 messages and your server is set to retry every 10 minutes then it will take a long time to send and usually timeout, especially under heavy amounts of email. Even if you sent no new mail to yahoo, 100 queued messages would take over 3 hours to send.
Recommendations are:

limit to 5 messages per connection(specifically to yahoo.com, if possible)(if unable, then decrease retry intervals)
limit to 50 recipients per message
increase of concurrent connections per IP (within reason)

Hope this helps everyone!

This is my living, I pay for the leads! you should not block. If the customer wants to unscribe, they can and we do not bother them again. We do not have time or money to think about virus sending, These customers have asked for more information, not just a random send. Yahoo will not have a good name with me and I will let every one know that uses Yahoo

I get emails about "fbuddies" in my yahoo account, but I send out emails to others at yahoo regarding my legitimate work at home business (which by the way they have requested) and I get some of them back as undeliverable or rejected? What´s up with that?

my clients that want my e-mails can not get them from me so please fix the problem

I also get some of the most vulgur emails
and yet you block my legal business from getting to my clients, who have asked for this information!

This is killing me! I cannot contact people wanting me to contact them, whether it is personal or business. Yahoo needs to STOP THIS PRACTICE IMMEDIATELY!!! I wish I could get a message out to all Yahoo users to change their e-mail accounts to something other than Yahoo. Who knows, hopefully someone is doing this already.

Yahoo blows. I have missed personal emails and not known it until my friend calls and asks why I have not responded days later. I check my junk box on a regular basis and I never got her email!! I should not have to have someone call me to see if my email was delivered, should i?! But thank goodness I don´t seem to be in danger of not getting my daily dose of information about explicit material delivered to my INBOX. Phew!! I am not a techie person, so not sure WHAT they are doing, but all I know is it SUCKS!!!

Great and True article. I just launched a new electronics auction site and am having trouble with yahoo and only yahoo when people sign up to bid. Yahoo is a Headache.

This is what you can find from yahoo´s Internet standard practices.
Don´t send unsolicited email. Make sure that all email addresses are confirmed with an opt-in process that ensures the recipient wants to receive your mail. Source: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/basics/basics-55.html
My question to yahoo. HOW can any double opt-in process work if the requested verification email can´t even get through to yahoo´s users email inbox?
I´ll answer myself. SIMPLE: Blacklist the real spammers, not the ones which have nothing to do with spam!!! We let the world know, use gmail, hotmail or others if you want to get your emails delivered to your inbox.

After 3 months of sending support emails to Yahoo, we still don´t have this solved. Yahoo is costing us $$$$ trying to get the dang problem figured out.

I deal with people requesting information on a web site. Any Yahoo customers I have are lost, because Yahoo treats my mail as spam. Yahoo is costing me $$$ as well as filling my mailbox with "undelivered mail" msg (19 in the last 3 days). Lets get it together Yahoo.

I´ve been in contact with a suprisingly kind yahoo support rep and supposedly, in order to get your mail through without delays you need the following:

SPF records in place
DomainKeys in place
IP addresses not blacklisted (obviously)
MOST IMPT: Each domain that sends out mail should have its own IP address.


If you´re on a VPS or dedicated server and have loads of domains.then each domain needs its own IP address.

Sucks balls doesn´t it?

I don´t have Domainkeys and just one IP address for four of my domains.and Yahoo sends me 250-300 deferred connection bounces each time I send out my weekly newsletter. That´s 95 of all my bounces. Thanks Yahoo!

I guess nobody read my first comments and just likes to complain There is a workaround for this issue if you have access to manage your outgoing mail server.

Follow the rules I posted below and it should clear up most of your issues

The basic quideline is smaller batches, more often

Good emails won´t get through if your mailserver is backed up with a ton of messages in the queue.

It doesn´t hurt to do a little troubleshooting and to watch what ia happening to your outgoing mail to yahoo. Chances are that mail is going through, but only a very small amount of it like 5 messages per connection. You will need to increase the number of connections or increase the retry interval

Check the mail logs, there is difference between no mail getting through and most mail not gettng through. If your server connects and the sessionis immediately dropped, then there could be another issue reverse DNS lookup, SPF record, blacklisted etc

Currently, we´ve currently set our threshold to use 1 concurrent connection and to send emails to 1 recipient every 2 minutes. This still returns the 421/451 error from Yahoo. which makes me wonder if James´ solution (see 1/29/2007) was ever tried and proven to work at all, considering the results above?

Also, can the 20 increase in deliverability be truly attributed to the DomainKeys installation?

Does Yahoo still offer whitelisting? I have had requests in for months and I never can get an answer back from them. All i receive is their automated reply. Anyone have any ideas?

Having recently started experiencing these problems, I agree with many other comments here.Yahoo should change this policy immediately. Although, it may already be to late.I am telling everyone I know with yahoo.com e-mail addresses that they should switch to gmail.

Perhaps they will change their ways once they no longer have any one using their unreliable e-mail system.

I too run a website where members register and receive an automated confirmation email. Over the last week the automtaed functions have been replaced by human 24x7 intervention. Here is something. Not proven, just something I tried after reading everything. I found that if I manually resent the message after it was in queue for at least 1 minute, sometimes it would go through. If it didn´t, I waited another 2-3 minutes before trying again. Interesting thing is that when it worked, all other messages behind this one would go through too. It´s like it opened a security gate. If anyone is tech savvy and can try to write some code that would automatically resend a message in queue every 3-5 minutes, wondering if that is the workaround. Also, every message we send is a unique one.we send no more than 1 per minute.so the small batch solution is not a solution.

On May 12 I posted about my problems. Knock on wood, I think they are fixed. I send out automated confirmation emails throughout the day (one at a time), and twice a day a batch of several hundred emails (sent at one minute intervals). Each day, twice a day, I manually went into our mail server using WHM and tried to push these emails to Yahoo. After a week of doing this all of a sudden the automated process is getting email thru to Yahoo again. Keep in mind that the form and email for Yahoo is useless. It eventually sends you in a full circle, starting you at point one again. We never finished their process. Again, no scientific evidence here. Just tried something and it worked for us.

I concur Yahoo is unresponsive and is doing a disservice to thier customers. I can´t even reply to Yahoo generated mail from long time customers. The company has not responded to at least 10 requests for explanation. All of our server tests are going though as OK, but they are still blocking.

-change ip of your smtp server
-use multiple mx record at your dns
-secure your mailserver from spam virus etc.

Greylisting is a proven antispam measure. anyone as loarge as Yahoo! should be using it. I am a mail hosting provider and we use greylisting for all out clients. Before you go thrashing your mail hosting provider, learn alittle about the technology. It really does make your mail box not as full with spam. I say good for Yahoo! We need to make spamming so difficult that people don´t want to spam anymore.

Michael, you are correct about greylisting. We use it as well to reduce the amount of SPAM. However, as stated below by an anonymous Yahoo employee, they are not greylisting. They are deprioritizing servers and not allowing any connections even upon resending the message multiple times. Especially mail servers that host multiple domains (shared server environments).

that is exactly what happened to me. after 3 months of sending them info, i got a questionaire. after spending several hours replying to it, i got this answer: Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

We appreciate your responses to our questionnaire.

However, based on the information you have provided us, we cannot
systematically deliver your email to the Inbox at this time. We suggest
that you ask your users to set up a filter in Yahoo! Mail to ensure that
they get your email messages in their Inbox. Yahoo! Mail users may find
more information regarding filters at this page:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/mail/manage/manage-06.html

If you significantly change your policies, please feel free to contact
us again to submit a questionnaire in 6 months, and we will re-evaluate
your answers and mailing practices at that time.

Your patience during this process is greatly appreciated.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail.

Regards,

Ashlar

What a croc!!! Who is Ashlar, and does he live in the USA? I cannot send myself or my wife an e-mail without getting that stupid error message.

Your problem is probably that the hostname your mail server is sending and IP address do not match up.

postmaster, I think that you may be correct. Question is, how is this resolved?

I´m not convinced on the hostname issue. I know a number of sites where the mail server name and the hostname don´t match up and they deliver fine.

I have had the same problems with yahoo email delivery but i managed to fix them and now i hope that my solution will help others as well.

Basic musts : you must have a valid reverse-dns and forward-dns for your IP that both match each other, this is trivial. you also should have an SPF record that authorizes your IP address to send emails from your IP address.

Without those basics setup, you will probably get "451" and "421" errors ALL the time, so you must fix those first.

After you have those two fixed, check the CONTENT of the email you are sending. what we have discovered is that our content was marked as "spam" by the yahoo filter, and thats why they gave us back a "451 temporary deferred [170]" errors, i did a simple test and tried sending a TEXT/PLAIN message and it gave me "250 ok dirdel" easily every time i sent it, so - viola - the content was bad.

We sit on the content and fixed it so it will give "250 ok dirdel" all the time, and now the problem is permanently fixed.

Hope this helped some people, cheers.
And please dont blame yahoo for doing what they are doing probably better than any one else - block spam, they have a well solid reputation to keep hold of.

We were able to resolve this issue by setting Timeout.hoststatus to 0s (on Sendmail). In our case, Yahoo was returning 421 errors, which is a "temporary host failure", which it seems as though it should have been 451, or a "temporary mailbox error". Sendmail was caching the MX lookings for a period of time, as well as the "temporary host failure" for the host that was cached in DNS, causing any attempt to the host for 30 minutes (default for Timeout.hoststatus) to be "Deferred" after the first 421 received. I hope this is helpful to others.

Miki or anyone else, do you know any good service or program to check content of an email that i send out. To see if content is spammy. Thanks in advance.

After a few months of better results by setting our retry to every 1 minute, we were still having serious backlogs of Yahoo mail pending until today. Now we´re connecting and actually sending 20 or 30 messages at times with one connection. Instead of 6000 pending Yahoo e-mails per day that simply don´t get delivered, our server is definitely staying on top of things with only 100 ever pending at any one time.
It looks like Yahoo either made some changes, or they finally processed the request-for-whitelisting forms we submitted a few months ago.
I read today that Yahoo has also implemented SSL on SMTP for outbound traffic. We enabled negotiated SSL over SMTP on our end today, which probably didn´t fix the problem alone (it was resolved before we turned it on), but it can´t hurt.
Here´s the total summary of what we´ve done:

Add SPF records
Filled out all of the forms on Yahoo´s site with detailed information about who we are, what we do, and why Yahoo members receive our e-mails.
Up our retry interval

Well, I may have spoken too soon. We started seeing 421 "Message Deferred" messages again, and we´ve got a backlog of 250 messages to Yahoo.

I´ll post another comment in a few days when things seem more definitive.

We had the same problems for about a month. To solve it we:

Ensure we had a valid reverse-dns for the mta ip address.
Added SPF records
Increased retry intervals for yahoo only
Disabled parallel connections to yahoo mta
Changed content of some frequent mails as stated by Miki Berkovich

We didn´t contact yahoo or implemented DomainKeys. We still receive some 421 errors, but in these cases mails always goes through after some retries.

This is really troublesome. There has to be a better way. For example, if the person trying to send me an email is in my address book, I should be able to be assured of delivery. The biggest thing is that it, on the surface, sounds like an attempt to get people to pay for better service by making current service intolerable. As I look deeper, the paying members are getting this lousy treatment, too. This will be a good way to get people to stop using email if it´s going to become unreliable.

I can say this for sure, this is a big crock. I have 3 ISP´s we send from through the same MTA with the same config. Our newest ISP gets these backoff messages constantly on their IP, but going through the 2 other ISP´s on their own IP´s, NO PROBLEMS.

So I too am stuck in the countless Yahoo circle of them not being remotely clueless on how to troubleshoot anything beyond a light bulb.

All else being equal. same MTA. how can 1 IP get this problem but the other 2 do not granted the 1 IP is new but I´ve been tyring to get around this for a month with no success. Also this 1 new IP has no problems delivering to ANYONE else except Yahoo.

BW

implementing domainkeys wasnt enough. messages are now going in the spam folder. guess i´ll have to order one ip per domain hosted in order to have valid reverse DNS. doesnt that go against the common policy to preserve IP "waste"?

anyone know if domain policy is supposed to remain in test=y mode? yahoo´s own policy is set to yes.

What we have done against spam for my company is to allow our old email address (spamtrap)to recieve all messages, spam and all. But the autoresponder tells the user to send the message again to a different email address with a warning not to send ads, spam, or unsolicited messages to the new address. It has worked so well for years now.
Once a day we simply delete all messages in the spam trap address.

The premise is that spammers generally do not care to read your responses and in many cases are using invalid sender email addresses anyway. It works if you only give out the spam trap address on your webpages and business cards.

In my first post here I described how we handle spam in our company using Autoresponder. The problem is that since the vast majority of spammers use yahoo email addresses, our server is sending these autoresponses to yahoo servers which in turn thinks we are sending spams to them. The autoresponse messages contain our company info and phone numbers. Parsing the message would show it is not spam.

So now its us versus yahoo. Who gets to block spam, a majority of which is coming from yahoo?

appearantly they´ve started using this practise on their chat programmes as well,now you either recieve a no response from server or an error stating it has taken to long to log in ,or a room with 3 people is full.

I´ve done a lot of testing with my email service sending to Yahoo. Deliverability is spotty and seems to depend on how many recipients you´re sending, but they do get through eventually. I posted the test results to the site. Hope this helps other people trying to solve this issue.

http://www.listrocket.com/public/forum.php?mode=thread&cat=0&thread=2296

Best option seems to be: don´t use Yahoo for important email.

The last post was the closest I have seen to the truth of the situation. I work for a large scale ESP and we had similar issues to everything that has been posted here. Whitelist, domain keys - didn´t matter. If you sent to Yahoo, you got temporary deferrals. I would estimate that (on average) 85-90 of all email got through over the course of several delivery attempts in a 24 hour period (mostly on the 1st attempt, interestingly enough), but given the volume of mail our customers a) send and receive and b) send and receive to Yahoo, the problem was still quite noticeable. Why? Because the Yahoo bounces were so far out of proportion to what they saw everywhere else, it was glaringly obvious there was a problem.
Forget their forms and support, it is a complete waste of time. None of my contacts could help either. Finally, I found myself at an event where there were several folks from Yahoo (mostly PR folks) and I pretty much cornered them and told them I sincerely needed help, as their problems/policies were causing massive backup (again, given the volume sent to Yahoo) on our MTAs and an increasingly angry customer base growing tired of wasting their money on their Yahoo recipients. Two days later I got back from the event and I had a voicemail from a guy in Yahoo web mail.
After a very long (and bizarre) conversation, he acknowledged that this was an anti-spam message whereby Yahoo only allows a limited number of threads per IP and a limited number of connections per thread. Once you cross the threshold with either the number of threads or the number of connections per thread, you will get the deferral message. period.
The next day we set a custom delivery policy on a particularly massive customer (on a dedicated IP) which followed these guidelines and their next mailing pretty much had 100 delivery if you removed normal bounces, timeouts, etc. We still received a few deferrals, which may be a result of imperfections in our mailer or may be a result of the unperfect science that is Yahoo. At any rate, it worked. We haven´t been able to apply this across the board, yet, but on a trial basis, it continues to succeed.
I don´t want to spell out the specifics of it, for fear of aiding spammers and morons, but I will tell you that the number of threads and connections is impractically low. You need a fairly powerful MTA, otherwise, you are likely not going to be able to make this work.
Hope this helps and good luck, guys. Yahoo is a major pain.
the dude

I´ve given up, and switched to gmail. To he with yahoo, it´s time they went the way of Lycos.

The answer to the problem is obvious, as max has indicated. Quit using Yahoo. Find a reputable e-mail service. We´re officially posting notice to all our customers that we will not guarantee mail delivery to Yahoo addresses. This is Yahoo´s problem. We´re not going to waste our time with their useless maze of rules and guidelines.

Will I be able to obtain lost e-mails from Marc to early August of 2007?

The sad thing about this is that eventhough they have placed this stringent protocol for combating spam. it still seems to get through. LOL!

Thanks, is interesting as i have had a couple of rejections
to, i thought, addresses which were successful, before.

I should know the answer to this one, but not 100. If I send to multiple addresses and get a rejection on one or more, does the email get through to the others or is it rejected for all. Have been told that it goes through to the others, but would very much appreciate it if that can be confirmed.

Trying to send emails to friends, and i get sporatic responses sometimes days later that the content of my message did not allow them to send it? failure to send messages 3 and 4 days later.

FYI
some of Yahoo´s tech admin emails
abuse-admincc.yahoo-inc.com
cc-priority-mailcc.yahoo-inc.com
mail-abuse-bulkcc.yahoo-inc.com
domainadminyahoo-inc.com

I was able to get an inch or two by sending the same email every day saying:

This ticket has been open for of days. This is my th email about this ticket - I will continue to email with
requests for status updates until I am contacted strictly by phone. I have heard no response except for the auto-response. I HAVE NOT requested this ticket be closed please contact me at and to resolve this issue.

I then received some emails from Samuel Cyprian with Yahoo Customer Care.
"Occasionally, interruptions or disruptions in email transmissions over
the Internet will render a message undeliverable. While this is very
rare, it does happen."

I called BS on that with

"The very nature of email servers make them retry after it has failed, my setup in particular is set to continue to retry for 6 hours - thus the above statement seems to be from a tier 1 technical support person. Also if these events are "rare" why does it happen to emails our sever (and several other administrators across the Internet) send on almost a daily basis? I see no factual basis for this statement. Please escalate this
problem to someone that will be able to handle the problem in a professional manner."

I´m probably going to start rejecting new users from Yahoo emails - because we cannot confirm their email addresses and start blocking incoming email from Yahoo.

I just banned yahoo.com emails from our system. i´m happy now.

The problem we have here in canada is that one of the biggest ISPs in the country - Rogers - uses Yahoo mail, so to refuse mail destined to Rogers.com (actually Yahoo.com) means about half of your customer base and friends aren´t able to get reliable email from you.
It´s a HUGE problem.

In addition to mail rejects general email usage functionality has been rendered unusable! My page displays, "done but with errors" for the past 3 weeks. Yahoo quality has erroded considerablyUnable to reply, open emails, forward etc. In a word, "you suck"!!! I´m getting a Gmail account.

BT are now doing the same (even uses the same Yahoo deferred message). btinternet addresses are now useless. half of the UK can now not get all their email - well done boys!!
We comply with all RFCs and guidelines, but WE have all our clients complaining to US.
FFS - everyone PLEASE get decent ISPs / email and dump these guys.

As a system administrator, I did not run into this problem until I upgraded servers and got new IP addresses. Suddenly, every email sent to a Yahoo account got bounced with the dreaded 421 Message.

I, too, had some meaningless correspondence with this Samuel Cyprian fellow, who evidently did take several of my domains off of the dreaded list. Evidently they cannot clear the ip address, just domains.

I thought the problem was fixed, but then sent a Thanksgiving note to a different domain holder´s clients and all Yahoo mail was blocked.

We´re VERY concientious about opt-in lists, clearing bad addresses, etc., but these guys have screwed down the hatch until NO mail can go through. Pity the poor guy just trying to send an email to a Yahoo account who never sees the error.

I´ve asked this Cyprian fellow to clear a list of client domains for Yahoo mail, and may consider switching to a different set of IP addresses on my server, but I also noted to Yahoo that I´m tempted to post the following admonition on our web sites:

ATTENTION YAHOO ACCOUNT HOLDERS
Your email cannot be processed due to Yahoo constraints. Do not use a Yahoo address on this web site. We strongly urge you to switch to your ISP´s email, your business email, or some other reputable firm. After many hours of trying to resolve this issue, Yahoo is unable to do what POP servers have been
doing for twenty years.deliver mail reliably to you.

Help jail Chinese pro-democracy advocates?
THAT Yahoo can do!

We are having this problem with yahoo mail - getting all emails sent to their accounts returned. We are a national charity providing support and never mailshot. All emails are replies to requests for advice that come to us and they are still being bounced. Attempts to contact yahoo have had no response. Anyone who can offer any advice please do - its really hard becuase people who contact us are often desperate and at the mo we simply cannot reply. The link to a form to fill out to be whitelisted on yahoo´s site doesn´t work and to get any message to them I had to log onto their system which made me really mad. All we can do for now is post a message on our website that we cannot reply to those email accounts.

This problem seems to have been made even worse with Yahoo now seemingly running BT Internet mail services which means anyone on a btinternet.com mail address is being affected. What a joke!

Add New Zealand to the list. Our biggest ISP, Xtra, has joined with Yahoo and we are having exactly the same problems with our email services. No customer service either - Yahoo just send form emails in reply to questions which direct you to their support webpages which do not answer the questions. What can you do?

So pleased to have found this, which at least confirms my suspicions that all was not well with my emails. Ironically I ran into this problem because I was warned that my very old email account was going to be closed, so I transferred all my newsletter subscriptions etc to my BT Yahoo email. When I complained to BT ´support´ that emails didn´t seem to be getting through, I was told that their system was working normally and advised to try reinstalling Outlook Express (!), as if that would make any difference.
If our Postman behaved like this, he would be in jail.

I think it´s time (now after complying will all Yahoo "demands" and requesting 5 FIVE times to be removed from the ban and being ignored) that action be taken against Yahoo! Inc.

We have similar problems, but it has got far worse over the last 2 weeks. We now consistently get no mail at all from various customers, domains and addresses. We have tested it out via various other email hosts and all bar btconnect are not getting through at all - with the 421 messages only being returned to some domains - the rest get nothing back at all to let them know deliveries have been unsuccessful. We were originally had a btinternet.com account, but that is now under the yahoo umberella - try explaing to a customer that them not receiving your emails isn´t our problem, but their own ISP - it´s ridiculous.

I read the attached threads with interest. Our mail server appears to confirm to the yahoo ´standards´, however we also receive the deferral message. It appears in the last quarter of 2007 Yahoo has taken over hosting rights for the largest ISP´s in UK, Canada and NewZealand. Is it possible they have bitten off more than they can chew and that the deferral message is just that - ´I´m too busy, go away´?

unfortunately Grey listing is not where it needs to be at the moment. My company experimented with it and experienced the same problems, but of course reversed. There is a trick to gray listing, If the intended recipent SENDS and e-mail to the original sender, that e-mail address is temporarily whitelisted and can send without the delay, It only works if the server using the graylisting actually send out using the greylisiting server, but it does work.

I have spam turned off, messenger turned off I just have constant problems accessing my mail account. Thinking of changing now. Fed up with this, plus I am not getting emails from my googlised relatives.

Oh come on! Way to overreact! The article gets a very important point wrong. "message was temporarily deferred" means the connecting SMTP server must retry the request. Only a 2xx response code represents a successfully sent mail. The RFC2821, section 4.5.4.1 Sending Strategy, states that "mail that cannot be transmitted immediately MUST be queued and periodically retried by the sender". If you are losing mail because your client/server is giving up as soon as Yahoo defers, then your software is broken. Many mail servers (Exchange, Postfix, Qmail.) have the ability of deferring incoming mail due to maintenance, high load, technical problems, etc. Even if the sending client is unable to contact the destination server, it is still required to continue retrying.

Steve, it isn´t overreacting when the "temporarily deferred" means we kept trying again after 5 mins, then 15 min, then 30 mins, then 2 hours, then 6 hours then 1 day and still keep getting a temporarily deferred message. If it is blocked, they should use a 5 code to say that it isn´t going to be delivered instead of having thousands of emails stack up in the queue all destined for yahoo being tried a lot of times and not EVER going through.

Recently implemented exchange 2003 we can receive email inbound and outbound from everyone including yahoo however, when replying, forwarding or emailing to yahoo receive delay notice a email never delivers. This is an important issue to resolve for our organization any help is appreciated.

Hi All,

We cannot deliver messages to users with Yahoo Mail consistently, we keep getting the 421 message.

Here is the message we get:

Failed Recipient: yahoo.com
Reason: Remote host said: 421 Message from (000.000.000.000) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html

We have both DKIM and DomainKeys set up, and I tested the configuration. Also, we have reverse DNS, SPF, and an email policy in place.

sigh shouldn´t this be enough for Yahoo?

We have created a free online dating site in Chinese / English and wish to be able to send notifications to our users when someone sends them a new message. These notifications are configurable by the User, and can be disabled. I´ve run dnsreport on http://www.zendear.com and everything is as it should be (the only fail is intentional recursive lookups).

Questions:

1. Who can I contact at Yahoo about this?

2. What information / evidence will they need that we´re not spammers, and the notifications that people receive are because they configured their accounts to notify them (and that they can turn off the email notifications)?

Thanks very much, and happy holidays!!!

ya i have the same problem, it does not deliver the correct mail

i also have the same problem. i´ve been watching my log and find out so far that my server has been trying to send the email 5 times from 08:57 am until 10:44 am, but still deferred.

2007-12-29 08:57:51.942276500 starting delivery 41246: msg 1547115 to remote xxxyahoo.com

2007-12-29 09:04:32.019166500 starting delivery 41248: msg 1547115 to remote xxxyahoo.com

2007-12-29 09:24:32.740615500 starting delivery 41258: msg 1547115 to remote xxxyahoo.com

2007-12-29 09:57:52.597219500 starting delivery 41298: msg 1547115 to remote xxxyahoo.com

2007-12-29 10:44:32.034911500 starting delivery 41359: msg 1547115 to remote xxxyahoo.com

cat current | tai64nlocal |grep 41359

2007-12-29 10:44:32.034911500 starting delivery 41359: msg 1547115 to remote xxxyahoo.com
2007-12-29 10:44:37.757888500 delivery 41359: deferral: Connected_to_66.196.97.250_but_greeting_failed./Remote_host_said: 421_Message_from_(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)_temporarily_deferred_-_4.16.50. Please_refer_to_http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html/

> Dennis Robinson made this comment on December 05, 2007
> I think it's time (now after complying will
> all Yahoo "demands" and requesting 5 FIVE
> times to be removed from the ban and being
> ignored) that action be taken against
> Yahoo! Inc.

I don´t know if I´d go that far, but something should be done to wake them up.

This is very wrong, and it´s wasting many, many people´s time. How many thousands of hours of IT time -- expensive time -- has gone into this problem with nothing to show for it? Yahoo should be more responsible.

BTW, The trick of having someone email you first and then replying doesn´t work either.

This is maddening to me, every new client I get seems to have yahoo and it takes me double the time trying to communicate. Is there a light at the end of this dark long tunnel? Yahoo needs to wake up and communicate with someone to fix this issue!!! I don´t have this problem with google or any other service, why Yahoo, why now?

It looks like Yahoo now wants you to create your group list within Yahoo Groups, which you will need to keep updated. When you mail one email to the group address it will forward your email to the group´s members.

It is a big problem. We have very frustrated customers who blame us for Yahoo´s inability to correctly handle SPAM.

This is totally frustrating, not just with sending email to Yahoo accounts but to accounts on the other ISP´s that they manage email for, e.g., btinternet and xtra.co.nz. I went through their process filled out the forms and got the following reply -
Hello Ben,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.
We cannot systematically exempt your mailings from our SpamGuard technology since the IP address of the server appears to be a shared domain mail host and have multiple clients sending email. We will maintain the current information in our database as it is configured. This allows delivery of your mailings to oscillate between the Inbox and the Bulk Mail folder as Yahoo! users choose.
Please keep in mind that our SpamGuard technology will continually monitor user feedback pertaining to emails coming from your mail server(s), and as such, the user feedback we receive will be one of the factors that influence where your emails are most appropriately delivered. Our studies have indicated that when users see messages incorrectly categorized, they notify us within hours of delivery.
If you implement significant changes to your mailing practices, feel free to contact us again. You may refer to the Help page below for some information and general guidelines that we have found to be effective in maintaining good mailing lists:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/bulk/bulk-01.html
Once we have received the above information, we will make every attempt to resolve your concern.
For assistance with delivery issues to Yahoo! Mail, please visit:
http://postmaster.yahoo.com/
Your patience during this process is greatly appreciated.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail.
Regards,
Rachel
Yahoo! Customer Care
43211960
For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/
They haven´t responded to my reply but it looks like they don´t like shared servers.
It wouldn´t be so bad if email got through eventually, even if into spam folders, but it looks like most of it just disappears into a black hole.
Yahoo suck, big time!
Ben

This issue persists in 2008. Yahoo also appears to be filtering emails after they are recieved, but BEFORE they are passed along to the target yahoo persons inbox. Because the email was technically "not rejected" by the mail server, no undeliverable email is sent either.

Many ISP´s and web hosting companies have complained to Yahoo but Yahoo just laughs at them. Yahoo is not going to make any less money if they don´t comply with the requests from these companies or even their own customers so they don´t give a d***.

I think those in the UK suffering from the non-ability to deliver to BT/Yahoo addresses should report them to OFCOM for ´uncompetitive practice´. Those with BT/Yahoo accounts should be made aware that they may not be receiving all the genuine email.

Xtra here in New Zealand now uses Yahoo to do their mail services. When our company recently set up a mail server with its own IP address I discovered that any mail we sent to xtra customers was being sent to the web-only Bulk folder. Yahoo was reporting a "421 message". I have been trying, so far unsuccessfully, for 6 weeks to try and get Yahoo to whitelist our mail server. No where on xtra or Yahoo web pages does it state that their default policy is to blacklist new mail servers. Yahoo as a company is a disgrace, as is xtra and Telecom in New Zealand.

Have seen their NEW trick on how to NOT respond? It has something to do with attachments. Yahoo rejects your response because they don´t allow "attachments." So I sent them a completely blank eMail.and it was rejected becuase of attachments.

I agree with TheHub (and others). This is a ridiculous way to try to deal with the spam problem. It is also highly irresponsible as it affects the credibility of email as a message medium as a whole.
As an admin of a heavily visited web site whose customers depend on being able to receive information via email that they have requested, I am currently having to decide between banning yahoo.co.uk and btinternet.com email addresses or employing questionable/unethical tactics in order to get mail delivered to our customers.

We have, of course, been through most the suggestions listed here to try to resolve the issue. ie. SPF records, running well managed dedicated mail servers, fruitless requests to yahoo including completing their ´bulk senders form´.

The ´good´ news is that their mail service (as well as other Yahoo interests) will be probably be under Microsoft control shortly

I hate to resort to verbal insults, but what a shower of a***oles the mail policy decision makers at yahoo are.

I think the way Yahoo handles their mail servers is absolutely ridiculous. We are now receiving another response."server refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html" along with the other message. We currently have about 12,000 messages queued. All the other large providers have policies in place that protect their users and also allow us to send mail. You can´t reach them, or resolve issues with their forms. This has been going on for years and I really do see how they consider this method of email server management in the least bit practical or benificial to their customers. I know that even if one message doesn´t get to our users, we jump through hoops to make sure it doesn´t happen again. Screw Yahoo and their stupid email administrators.

Amazingly, Yahoo may benefit from delaying email delivery:

I feel all your pain - I´ve been through exactly the same issues (though on a smaller scale than others). The only way I managed to get the mail to deliver quicker was to increase the retry interval and decrease the host status validity in Sendmail. If nothing else, it just tries more frequently to deliver, and eventually has a higher chance of not being rejected upon connection with a 421 message.

Randy,

exim -o 86400 -r yahoo -i | xargs exim -Mrm

That will delete all mail bound for yahoo over 24 hours old from the spool if you use exim. I for one blocked yahoo´s spiders til they head on over to WallyWorld and buy a clue.

We´re having the same issue and it´s been extremely frustrating. We´ve done everything on the checklist above and more. We have domainkeys and spf records and I´ve contacted Yahoo about 7 times, always getting lame autoresponses.

One of the most frustrating things is that customers think we´re at fault, not realising the problem lies with Yahoo and how they manage their mail servers. Yahoo thinks they are ´all powerful´ so they feel they can get away with this kind of crap. ISPs and web hosts should start boycotting Yahoo. We have started to do this. We will not accept new customers who use yahoo in their order forms. They are required now to use their real ISP. We are also telling customers to encourage their own customers to only contact them from non-Yahoo email accounts. If more people do this, maybe they will stop their bull****.

Having suffered the same fate, I am glad I found your article, but an now concerned that these overzealous practices will eventually put me out of business. My clients are not spammers. They need to email to people with Yahoo addresses. You might as well add earthlink, comcast, msn, hotmail, gmail and everyone else to this list, as they are doing it too.

I´ve taken this off the HIED-EMAILADMIN list:

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:59:44

I´ve been reviewing the comments regarding mail delivery to Yahoo! over the past few days and wanted first to apologize for the inconvenience and second to assure you that we are working furiously behind the scenes to remedy the issue as quickly as possible. Below is some background on what´s causing the mail deferrals and the steps we have taken and are taking:

While we do not have a greylisting policy, our antispam systems have been experiencing issues which may resemble greylisting behavior. Our goal is to accept legitimate mail on the first attempt, and not to cause queueing on the sending end. In fact, the actual issue is that we´ve imposed tighter anti-spam controls which occasionally generate temporary failure replies when IPs demonstrate behavior that our systems recognize (erroneously, in your cases) as spam.

The vast majority of senders´ mail is getting through to our users unimpeded. While there are certainly organizations that are receiving an excessive number of erroneous deferrals and "temporary failure" reply codes, there are no reports of messages not being delivered. As we continue making urgent fixes to the system over the upcoming hours and days, these backlogged messages will be delivered and your outbound queues will drain.

We have made a number of significant adjustments over the past several days to address these issues, and believe that most of the deferral behavior is on the decline. If you do continue to experience delivery problems, please review the site at http://postmaster.yahoo.com and report those problems through the Contact Us forms there. We do process all tickets that come through those forms, and are working hard to improve the service and responsiveness we provide. In addition, we are working to increase the self-service information available and to provide timely service updates at http://postmaster.yahoo.com.

I´ve also set up an e-mail list for comments -- deliverycommentsyahoo.com -- and encourage you to let us know about your organizations´ experiences so that we may better tailor the service in the future. Our goal at Yahoo! Mail is to deliver all of the mail our users want, and we´re working hard at that goal.

Thanks for your patience as we work to resolve these issues.

Mark Risher
Anti-Abuse Product Manager
Yahoo! Mail

I like how the Yahoo rep states:

there are no reports of messages not being delivered.

No kidding. Its because the report can´t get through. Your customer service for Small Business keeps telling my clients everything is OK because they can send mail and since they get the test message everything MUST and they do mean MUST be ok.

So far my only solution is to get clients off yahoo small business services.

Hi Mark from Yahoo - you guys are still having major issues. It cleared up for a couple of days but now back to the same thing again. Mail is not getting through and bouncing back with a temp referred message. It has gotten to the point to where if anyone signs up as a member in our system with a yahoo account we display a red bold message informing them of the issues with yahoo and that we cannot guarantee they will receive emails from us or others. We also display the link to this page so they can read about the issues themselves. Not Good!

Is there anybody there who really does care? Who truely listens? Is your business so big that you don´t have to listen to those who made your business big? We chose Yahoo for a reason, do we not matter anymore?

I have been sending to this address (email-address) for years. suddenly it is rejected by yahoo. (451) why

Mark from Yahoo,

I too am getting 451 messages from Yahoo and I have installed:

- DomainKeys
- DKIM
- SPF

Please give us a status update.

These big companies require our mail servers to do all this but non of their emails contain any of these. Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL. I have checked all their headers and they dont contain non of these requirements.
Our Mail Server has all these in place.
Domain Keys - Implemented
DKIM - Implemented
SPF - Implemented
Sender ID - Implemented

Funny how

However with all these in place, yahoo will still not recieve our messages nor the messages of clients. We have contacted, emailed and now are doing 30 emails to yahoo everyday as a record of our emails to yahoo. I use an auto form filler to send this to them. I get the same message back that means nothing. We provided our clients with the same form to fill out to get them to recieve the emails they send to their clients. Yahoo is not only disrupting business for us for our clients too. They figure if our clients get pissed at us they might switch to yahoo services.

As a business owner I am willing to do anything to get this resolved however its like a brickwall and after reading the other comments I see that Yahoo is just trying to be a bully. Maybe it will be good if they get bought out by Microsoft.

Same reoccurring problem with my computer. I can send to yahoo accounts from my gmail and other email addresses, just not from this machine. I get the error 451 deferred message ever single time and wouldnt you know that all of the new clients I am getting are with yahoo. I am wondering if there is a security setting on this machine that yahoo is rejecting however I haven´t found anything to date that would help identify it. This is very frustrating and its taking hours upon hours out of my day trying to resolve this issue. Yahoo says its Microsoft. I am at my wits end. Ironically enough, i get more spam mail generated from a yahoo address that any other. Perhaps they should consider blocking their outgoing mail settings as their incoming. I am not sure what I have to do to convince yahoo that i am not a spammer.

We finally got our mail server issues resolved with Yahoo by getting our mail server whitelisted. It took more than 6 weeks! Telecom and Xtra in New Zealand were appalling. Their customer service personnel are almost completely ignorant. People at Telecom tried to blame me for Yahoo´s problems! Needless to say I am trying to reduce our company´s exposure to Telecom/Xtra in every way possible.

Its still completely random. Im running a server with SPF, DK and fully RFC compliant. Compliance verified via several of the checkers.

This server relays legitimately for 2 domains. If the FROM address is one of the domains it gets through fine, if the FROM address is the other valid domain it never arrives and constantly referred. This is posting from same host via same smtp relay to the same btopenwound address - the only difference is the from field (which obviously works fine for everything else).

Whatever they´re doing i wish they´d tell us exactly what it is as im getting sick of people complaining about a fault my end when i know perfectly well it isn´t.

Well here we are on March 13th and we are still receiving these temporarily deferred email responses! Yahoo is not handling this issue very efficiently. We are not spammers, but their "anti-spam" policies are outrageous and are affecting the opinions customers have regarding their service. We use domain keys, SPF, and best practices for delivering mail to the internet. We are not spammers or bulk maiers but you have blocked our IP´s. Get it together Yahoo.

I am so frustrated. I just got new business cards made, 2500 cards to be exact, that all have my yahoo account on them and many of my clients are not able to recieve my emails!! I am getting that stupid deferred error message for so many of my emails and I could just scream! I am a real estate agent, not a spammer, and I am losing business over yahoo´s idiotic way of filtering through the emails. I have opened a gmail account and I am considering changing everything to get rid of this yahoo account - that might I add, I have only had for maybe 3 months since I switched companies!!!

We have set up dispatching servers specifically to deliver yo Yahoo / BTInternet domains. We have set our connection threads to only send 4 emails in a batch and then disconnect. It seemed to work for a time and our BT/Yahoo delivery went over 90. But now it seems Yahoo have gotten even tougher. Back to the drawing board!

We´re not an open relay. I ran the test at abuse.net and we passed. I´ve checked all of the RBL´s and we´re not listed. We´re an educational institution. We don´t spam anyone. I´d taser anyone here that I caught spamming through our mail server. Now, for whatever reason Yahoo has cooked up, we can´t send email to anyone with a yahoo.com email. We get a rejection message. The error below is straight out of our server logs. It´s from my work email address to my yahoo mail address. The subject was "test" and the body of the email said "test to see I can get this"

Mar 27 14:50:29 mailhost postfix/qmgr[27984]: 497B11A21FE: to=, relay=none, delay=5.3, delays=5.2/0.03/0/0, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com[206.190.53.191] refused to talk to me: 553 Mail from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX not allowed - [10])

I am email administrator for about 25 mail servers and responsible for managing emails for about 10000 users on our network. We host 1000´s of web site and also host few large financial web sites, including stock broker, credit card processing agent and few mortgage companies.

We always had yahoo deffered email problems but recently they have started completely blocking one of our server where an stock brokers web sites is hosted. They regularly send transaction summary to their clients through email which unfortunately also include yahoo email users. Since last 7 days yahoo have completely blocked this particular mail server sending only about 1000-1500 emails per day to yahoo email users. I have tried contacting yahoo email service through forms and have also complied with their standard email practice guide but they are still blocking our mail server and on top of that it seems impossible to contact yahoo email blocking support.

I will highly recommend yahoo email users to switch to gmail or some other paid email service where you can call and talk to someone about the problems you are having. Who knows they are blocking emails from your banks, credit card companies, mortgage companies, insurance companies and many other legitimate important emails. Now you really don´t want to mis them, do you ?

Our client is now sending advisory to all its yahoo email users to provide non yahoo based email address as they no longer be sending transaction summaries to yahoo email users.

it means finally we guys dont have a solution to this particular crapcommon guys there must some way to get out of this

Why Yahoo is misbehaving . Few months back they did the same rejecting the mails again from last 15 days thet are again rejecting it.
Q.1 Are there server are overloaded due to this it is rejecting the mail .
Q.2 Why they want to increase the no. of hists on there server i mean what is the reason they want other mail server keep on trying the email.
If yahoo wants to safeguard there server then others also make there policy to reject mail from yahoo server . To reduce Spam mail this is not the right way better to spend money on some ful proof Anti Spam solution .

It´s getting worse. Gmail has been deferring with the same codes and messages, which indicates they are borrrowing info from Yahoo.

And I also have had no luck with contactingthem, reducing the number of recipients/envelope, or even reducing the number of emails I send them to a handful.

They are also now nailing my domain from other servers, even though they are all on the SPF record.

All for a lousy 400 user mail list.

Since these deferrals could be considered a denial-of-service attack (locking up one´s SMTP queue), perhaps a class-action suit claiming interference with communications to third parties. If they bounced them, it would actually be less annoying.

Yahoo is deferring my server in a University. Mails arrive but hours later. This has been going on since long time ago. I´ve emailed them too to no avail.

Completely solved all my Yahoo deferral problems by setting up domainkeys.

I am the system administrator for a small web hosting firm dealing with the same issue. Anything we tried failed. All we can do is ask our users not to use Yahoo for crucial emails, and pray that Microsoft buys them and put an end to their misery. We have no problems with Hotmail or Gmail. The oddity is that historically most SPAM originated from anonymous Yahoo accounts.

Update - I have managed to get my emails to go threw with a ´jimmy rigg´. I now ask all my clients to first add me to their yahoo address book or contacts. At which point they will get all my email. I have asked all my clients to now ask their clients to add them to their yahoo address book first before sending them the email. I know it sucks but at least it works. It almost feels like might as well go back to snail mail and send them a paper reply. Why yahoo? Why do you do this to us?

Think I spoke too soon, I have domainkeys set up, thought it was solved, but it started in again last night. Blast it!

I work for a university and we´re having the same issue with them. We´ve been back and forth over it. We´ve been told were in a black hole list first. We proved that we were not. Then we were told that we were a relay. We ran the relay check at abuse.net and proved that we were not. Now we´re being told that we´re a proxy when I know for a fact that we are not. Our IPS wouldn´t allow it even if our mail server did.

I´m really sick of Yahoo and since I work at a University, we´ll begin advising all of them to get an account with Gmail or Inbox straight away. I have to tell you that based on the Webster´s Dictionary definition that they´ve certainly named their company properly


Ya·hoo Audio Help /ˈyɑhu, ˈyeɪ-, yɑˈhu/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[yah-hoo, yey-, yah-hoo] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun, plural -hoos.
1. (in Swift´s Gulliver´s Travels) one of a race of brutes, having the form and all the vices of humans, who are subject to the Houyhnhnms.
2. (lowercase) an uncultivated or boorish person; lout; philistine; yokel.
3. (lowercase) a coarse or brutish person.


Our Email Thread with the Yahoos Yahoo

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

Thank you for submitting this IP for retesting. I am currently unable to remove the block from our servers since this IP address still appears to be an open proxy.

I recommend that you download a utility so you can run an open proxy check on this IP address. Such utilities are available at:

http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/proxycheck.html

http://www.unicom.com/sw/pxytest/

Once you have ensured that open proxy is closed, please notify us and we will be able to retest this IP address.

For assistance with delivery issues to Yahoo! Mail, please visit:

http://postmaster.yahoo.com/

Your patience during this process is greatly appreciated.



Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail. Your case number for this issue is XXXXXXXXXX. Please reference it in all future communication about this particular issue.

Regards,

Chris Warren

Yahoo! Mail Customer Care

http://postmaster.yahoo.com



Original Message Follows:
-------------------------

We were never a proxy and never a relay. You blacklisted us because we subscribe to NJABL and it black listed you. If you have evidence to the contrary we would very much like to see it. We plan on advising all of our students not to use Yahoo mail if you continue. My boss is offering a substantial bounty for a single unsolicited email from us to a yahoo subscriber. If you continue we will have no choice but to suggest that our students get gmail accounts.

-----Original Message-----
From: Yahoo! Mail
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 8:39 PM
To: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject: Re: Other (xXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX)

Hello XXXXXXXXXX,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

I have retested the IP address you submitted and it appears that the open proxy/relay situation with this IP has been resolved. We have now removed the block from our servers for this IP address. However, please note that it may take approximately one week for the changes to take full effect.

For assistance with delivery issues to Yahoo! Mail, please visit:

http://postmaster.yahoo.com/

Please let me know if you still experience problems so we may assist you further to resolve your issue.

Your patience during this process is greatly appreciated.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail.

Regards,

Raoul

Yahoo! Customer Care

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:

http://help.yahoo.com/




Original Message Follows:
-------------------------

Mail-Id:
w1.help.re1.yahoo.com-/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/defer.html-1206649288-
8919

Name: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Email Address:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Domains: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.edu

Subject: Other

IP Addresses: Your mail servers are generating bogus error messages.
According to your web site, you have us listed as an open relay, which we are not. We are also not in any of the RBL39;s. I39;ve checked.

Error Codes: Mar 27 15:14:01 xxxxxxx EA2E51A2231:
to=lt;tahneshawilliamsyahoo.comgt;,
relay=g.mx.mail.yahoo.com[209.191.88.239]:25, delay=24, delays=0.02/0/24/0, ds n=4.0.0, status=deferred (host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com[209.191.88.239]
refused to talk to me: 553 Mail from xxxxxxxxxxxx not allowed - [10])


Mar 27 14:50:29 xxxxx postfix/qmgr[27984]: 497B11A21FE:
to=lt;recentcoin2000yahoo.comgt;, relay=none, delay=5.3, delays=5.2/0.03/0/0, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (delivery temporarily
suspended: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com[206.190.53.191] refused to talk to
me: 553 Mail from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX not allowed - [10])

Contents: I39;m sorry but I39;m not priviliged to give you another user39;s email contents. I will paste the test message that I sent myself.

Test to me


Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions - http://www.cox.smu.edu/intranet/facstaff/webfaq

Additional Info: Please fix this as it is affecting our ability to communicate with our students and our prospective students.

While Viewing: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-26.html

Form Name: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/defer.html

Yahoo ID:

Other ID:

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4)
Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4


Date Originated: Thursday March 27, 2008 - 13:21:28

-------

Well this last Thursday – 10 Apr – Yahoo suddenly started accepting the mail from our server… anyone has experienced the same thing?
I had to fill out that long form and send in a few other short ones, but always received the same canned answer. I started telling all my users to start switching email providers, but most could care less. Emails were in the queue for as long as 70 hrs, then Thursday it was all clear and the Email Relayers showed a bunch of email sent to Yahoo. I’m not complaining, I’m just “gun shy” not knowing how long this will last.

I have been dealing with this issue for over a month. Their forms are ridiculous, no matter how many times you try to contact them you never get an answer. They don´t give you a clear indication of the problem. They are disrupting legitimate business and the clients who unknowingly use Yahoo mail are the one the short end of the stick and complain to us. Things are followed and we only use one mail server same IP, SPF, RDNS etc. Nothing is work with Yahoo. No problems with anyone else. I HATE Yahoo and always suggest to others not to use them all members to use another email account such as GMAIL or Hotmail as MS gives you ways to fix and or contact. I hope MS buys Yahoo and fires all their email admins as they don´t have a clue. Not only this, I agree with another poster about a Class Action Lawsuit might be in order to get them to fix this problem and deal with our issues and repay for the lost business THEY are causing without correct ways to fix this issue. Screw their temporary problems, they are damaging legitmate business. They need to be held accountable.

We have been dealing with this for a year and a half now. We are not on any spam list nor have any open relays. Yahoo´s forms run you in circles and you never get any answers from them. One thing I notice is I can send to Yahoo.com mail accounts using my outlook express mail client but any mail going out from the server using php sendmail don´t get through the temporary deffered deal. Does anyone know of anyway to tweak sendmail to work better with yahoo.com We use a ticket system for support and of course all the Yahoo mails don´t make it back when we reply since the ticket system uses sendmail.

Joe

We administer a dedicated server with some quite large companies on it. Have been dealing with Xtra/yahoo for 10 days now to have experienced everything commented on above. Our server is to blame. I have requested in writing what server configuration it is they require but it doesn´t come. Most frustrating but my clients are seriously considering a an action against them if not fixed by today but seems that is not going to happen. They to like others here need reliable communication with their 200,000 distributors and of the NZ ones 22% are xtra who has contracted it´s mail out to yahoo. My clients believe their losses could be into millions. I also know of other business in the tourism / accom business who have lost major bookings because of either delayed mail or non delivery because mail is coming of sendmail. Xtra have tried to tell me we need to send bulk mail via smtp!
Also running a large active forum we have discovered all our posting notifications and password resets are in peoples spam boxes but most do not know they even have webmail with a spam folder. Therefore I maintain that our google adwords is considerably down as all those persons would have logged on to read the posting. Over the course of a day this could be 20,000 plus add views. = say 10.00 us$
In NZ the major telecom company xtra has contracted all its mail to Yahoo so you can see this is a major issue for a large number of people.

the yahoo mail administrators are one-reply team.
1) u fill up the webform.
2) u get a automated reply.
3) u get a reply from a supposed-human. (with a name); stating that you have something missing or incomplete in your form. e.g. missing url for privacy statement; is there a smtp error code,.etc
4) you reply to that email.
5) that´s it. you are not gonna get another email.
6) repeat step 1.

I finally gave up trying to make this work ´for free´ and bought a business email account from yahoo! :P

I set up a custom mail send function on my web server that sends all yahoo outbound mail via the yahoo mail server and the others through the standard php sendmail. All my yahoo emails now get delivered instantly (surprise surprise).

It´s clearly a money making scheme by yahoo but my customers need to receive their emails. :(

Dominic, how many messages are you sending per day or per month? I wonder if your solution would work for ´real´ email client campaigns in the hundreds or thousands of recipients

Andrea - my server sends a small number of emails, just when a client makes a purchase on my website (Less than 100 a day). Yahoo mails never got delivered even though the volumes were so small.

I remember reading about certain limits that yahoo impose when sending emails using their (business email) servers when I signed up for it. You should be able to find more info about their terms and conditions if you do some searching.

6/22/08 Ihave been using yahoo mail for 4 or 5 years. In the last few months or less, emails sent by friends have been getting to me hours after they are sent. I have always loved Yahoo email but now I am leaving it

This is happening for simple Happy Birthday emails from my web forums. This anti-spam tweak by yahoo.com is complete garbage and I have been advising people against using yahoo.com for free email and to go to gmail, aol, and msn for more reliable email.

This is exactly what is happening to us. We have been struggling with Yahoowho puts us in everyones spam bin. It just keeps on happening, and we have done EVERYTHING to comply and then some!! And we did not do anything wrong in the first place. Even when Yahoo gets back to you they say the issue has been resolved, and to let them know if you have further problems. And it just keeps going. I can´t wait until they get a civil law suit slapped on them so large it will force them to clean it up. If I were a rich man I would lead the charge!!

I use BT-Yahoo. A customer has just received, on Sept 3 2008, an email I sent using BT-Yahho on 5th August 2008! It wouldn´t be so bad if I had been told the original couldn´t be delivered. My message has been "stuck" on a server in California for over 4 weeks.
This is happening all the time!

incoming emails, date/time coded at yahoo server, are delivered to me hours and even days later .why??

Yahoo is blocking hundreds of our legitimate emails.

We are a small ISP with about 5000 users. Only a very small percentage of our users can send email to Yahoo, and even that is sporadic.

Hundreds of our users´ legitimate emails are rejected daily with the following message:
421 Message from (208.66.56.9) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html

I have filled out "Yahoo! Mail Delivery Issues Form" a few times. I get the following automated response message:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello,

This is an automated message regarding your recent request for Yahoo!
Mail Customer Care support. We have received your message and will
respond within the next 48 hours with an answer.

Thank you for reaching out to us. We look forward to helping you!

Sincerely,

Yahoo! Customer Care

Please do not respond to this message as no one will receive it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

But I never received a response from Yahoo and they continue rejecting our users´ legitimate emails.

After reading many forums and blogs, it appears that they are doing the same thing to many other small ISPs and companies with their own email servers.

This practice can interrupt many legitimate business communications and hurts many small businesses.

Bernie

We have been experiencing the Yahoo email deferring issue for about 6months now, but there had been no major break through in it. There is no concrete information available from Yahoo it self, posted several times on their support for proper solution of the issuebut no reply from them, Yahoo´s support sucks!!
Also, in my journey looking for a solution we thought using DomainKeys will do the job, we integrated the authentication in our email server, but still they are deferring the messages. can anyone tell me what is a proper solution for this as this is becomming a considerable issue with my clients and they are hassling me on daily basis!!
Please help!

We are getting this identical problem. We have filled out form after form for months now. I just submitted an 11 page form to them weeks ago and still no help from Yahoo. I am telling clients to create Google accounts that we can email to. Once they switch to Google, they love all the features Google offers. There is zero way to communicate with Yahoo and they just ignore us.

if yahoo.com can not handle my mail properly i will change to someone elese. i have had very important emails not reach their destination costing me an awful lot of money.

I changed my own email address from Yahoo to Gmail a couple of years ago because I was fed up with Yahoo delaying my incoming email. I always recommend Gmail now to people who ask me about free email accounts.

My answer to this was to setup my mail server to just route all its mail through Google. (I have a domain hosted there, so my mail server authenticates itself with Google´s SMTP server and then relays its mail through them.)

The only caveat is that you need to register any address you´ll be sending mail from as aliases of your account, otherwise Google will rewrite your From line.

When we recently reactivated our ebusinsight.com account to correspond with the people in our business network, I immediately started seeing undelivered email to people with Yahoo accounts who I had be corresponding with for years. I estimated that 80 of my LinkedIn and Plaxo connections use their personal email addresses (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, msn, comcast) to communicate with their network, rather than using a company email address.

Yahoo is making it IMPOSSIBLE to conduct business and to communicate with anyone who uses a Yahoo email address as an alternative their company provided email address.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP CHANGE THIS?

Very unhappy with Yahoo.

Add me to the list of deferred emails. Just checked the logs. Email deffered at 11:49, email success message at 18:49, after trying at least 10 times. So I guess thats nice, let´s deliver email 8 hours late. Great job yahoo.

SAME problem and did not realize for a long time! Im using domain email and the IP seems to be flagged by yahoo. only way to deliver to inbox is for the user to add the domain to the filter in their yahoo account!
What a waste!

Sent an email to my wife´s 5 year old yahoo address on Wednesday to see if she wanted to have lunch with me. she just got it this morning on Friday. Been trying to fix this problem for more than a month with yahoo. it´s simply impossible. Any of my clients with yahoo emails, I don´t even bother to send them emails anymore. I have to call them by phone.

We are having the same problem as all of you. I have submitted a form to Yahoo trying to get us off of thier greylist but as of right now I haven´t heard anything back. They have pretty poor turnaround, we had a similar problem with ATT/Bellsouth and it turned around and was fixed the same day.

I´ve been referring back to this article for the past year. Apparently these issues still exist. Here are the things I have configured:
- DomainKeys
- PTR and A records match
- HELO/ELHO domain matches the PTR and A records
- SPF records properly configured
- SMTP server set to send 5 messages per connection
- SMTP server set to make a max of 5 connections to each Yahoo mail server at a time
- SMTP server set to retry every 5 minutes

After all of that I still get deferred response from Yahoo. And when it eventually delivers it ends up in the SPAM folder.

The ironic thing is looking in your Yahoo spam folder only to see that it has caught a DomainKeys verified email. What an awesome system they have.

My CIO is on my a** at least once a day about this problem. We have tried everything. I hope the company fails and the rest of their employees get laid off as well.

Paid addresses, like sbcglobal.net, don´t have this problem. Or you can switch to Gmail´s, whose response to spam is to just deal with it instead of inflicting ftardedness of their users.

I am facing this same problem. Guess I am disappointed by reading most of the user comments. Guess Yahoo is never going to fix this issue. And I thought Yahoo had an excellent team doing major technological advancements,

Hi again. I have made a post here about a year ago on this subject, i have some new conclusions to give here that i hope will help the rest on how to fix this.

1. Basic musts : Reverse/PTR record on your IP address, and a similiar A record for that ip as well (i.e : X.X.X.X ptr=host.com , so host.com=X.X.X.X). this is MUST.

2. Use DomainKeys , it helps significally in delivering your email.

3. Ask people to add your "From:" address to their contact list. this helps ALOT in getting to the inbox.

4. Limit your server to connect to yahoo using 1 conenction only, and put a nice delay (of about 20-30 seconds) between each mail sent. a BIG reason yahoo deprioritize servers is because they either connect through too many connections simultaneously, or they send TOO many emails on each connections.

5. Remove addresses that bounce. this has a major impact on your IP reputation, and is also used as a major determinent for deprioritizing servers.

6. Configure SPF record for your sending domain as well.

And now final few important steps for the CONTENT of your emails :

7. make sure you DON´T use any blacklisted domain/url inside your emails ! yahoo keeps reputation data for domain names, and once a domain/url is blacklisted (due to user complaints) you will get "451 - temporary deferred [70]" all the time. use URIBL or SURBL to check the status of your domain names, and if they are blacklisted make sure you resolve their status.

8. check the CONTENT of your email. not by an external program, but by simply trying to send a test email to YOURSELF. if your own email gives you back a "421 deferred" or "451 deferred [70]" , or that it reaches your own spam folder then your content is problematic and should be fixed.


Thats it.

If you follow all of these rules, after about a week or two at most you will stop receiving temporary deferrals and your mails should go smooth easily.

It seems like the whole deferration problem is mostly due to poor IP reputation being caused by either problematic/incomplete server settings, or poor content and/or user complaints.

If you have all of those fixed, your delivery should have no problem going through.

Hope this helped, Miki

I wish there was a way to turn off SMTP connection caching or pipelining on an individual destination basis. That´s really the problem here - when you get on this greylist, Yahoo will eventually accept a connection, but then when you try to send more than 5 messages in a single connection (as per http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-277515.html;_ylt=AinULH_LY.f1Rcn3GcKjILlvMiV4), they "hang up" on you and then you are blocked for a few more hours. At least that´s what I see in my logs. Their EHLO response says they support PIPELINING, which is, more or less, BS.

I am another whose e-mail is being continually being blocked by Yahoo as spam when it is in fact family exchange material. Is there some way that the word can be put out to get everyone to quit Yahoo and adopt a proper server? Can anyone talk to this invisible ´Postmaster´ whose address is never given?

wow still going
Its basically like this.
YAHOO doesn´t know what its doing.
Blacklists are effective enough along with the usual check and access configurations in your mail server.
But Mark is right, about one thing, however, people are ABUSING the
"Mark as spam" feature. Its an effective filter for lazy people.
However, YAHOO wont tell you how many "users" it takes to "complain" (make as spam). Because in my investigation, its small like1. Then you have SYSTEM wide DEFER slapped on your entire domain, and your email will end up in everyone elses SPAM box. I´ve had to contact a user DIRECTLY telling this user to stop marking my email as spam (I´m the client!). But what it has done is expose this user as someone who considers my email as SPAM, thus, effecting our entire domain in regards to YAHOO. Its insulting (and probably embarrassing to the user being BUSTED).

But at the same time, YAHOO doesn´t know what its doing.

Jules.

All my domains publish proper SPF records, proper rDNS records, and I even utilize the DNSWL, and SpamDyke to ensure that messages are filtered inbound and outbound. Still Yahoo has been 421´ing us for years, depending on the number of e-mails sent. For this reason most of my peers suggest that I use aweber, or ConstantContact, but I don´t think it should be necessary to pay fees to another company when I manage my own 7,000 list with no hitches (except for Yahoo). They all suggest other providers instead of doing it myself, since the burden is then on the provider, most of which have paid into some kind of whitelisting program, which defeats the purpose of the internet if you ask me, and only puts a "price" on mail deliverability. Now, I just warn my subscribers that if they have a Yahoo account, expect their message to be delayed. This has caused some of them to jump ship, and move to Gmail, or Hotmail, which are more reliable free mail services since they both utilize SPF and rDNS. Now SPF and rDNS alone aren´t full-proof spam prevention methods, but coupled with other things, they are very effective in preventing spam delivery, since the wide majority of spam on the internet originates from only a few sources (per SpamHaus.org), who just continue to move around depending on the number of computers they can infect to create botnets, etc. Oh well, just thought, I´d mention my experience with Yahoo. I´m not re-compiling qmail to implement DomainKeys either. I think it´s pointless, and just duplicates SPF. Sure it might be more secure, but Yahoo should check for either or, just like Gmail.com does, not just DomainKeys.

I will be changing my email from yahoo.
Have been with yahoo since i got my first computer and never had problems. But i now cannot send emails to my family at all and find it so frustating. i am very dissapointed at the bad service i now get from yahoo.

I am sick of yahoo deferred and delivery in bulk mail folder. I think since yahoo is a very big mail service provider it has come social responsibility also. The process of white listing should be transparent and should be fast but its always very time consuming with no surety that your ip will be whitelited or not.

My son´s email was rejected by Yahoo when sent to my account. A contractor whose name is in my contacts had his email rejected by Yahoo when sent to my mailbox. What is going On??

451 errors on our mail server log however mail sent to yahoo account from our server ends up in the spam folder or sometimes in bulk mails. its annoying

I give up. I will start to recommend my users to leave yahoo. A company that do things like this will surely not last long, and I will be happy. So big is my anger right now.

I know what do you mean, I´m having a issue and I sent 6 forms already, the only message that i get is :
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care to answer your question. A support representative will get back to you within 48 hours regarding your issue. Until then, feel free to visit our online help center at http://help.yahoo.com/ or answers if you have not already done so.

It s so frustating.

I have the same problem. I have tried contacting Yahoo but never got any response. I run a server that hosts multiple domains. I read here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061024160658AAAh0QY That if you run a server that hosts multiple domains, there´s no way for you to get into Yahoo´s white list.

So what I´ve been doing instead, keep spreading the word and sharing this article. Encouraging everyone to leave their Yahoo Email accounts and use something else - Gmail for one.

Sad- this is the only company that has its own idea of how email should flow. They could not figure out how to keep up with search engines now mail.

Great, their reply template hasn´t changed for more than two years now! At least they are changing their ´names´. Just received this one:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

We cannot systematically exempt your mailings from our SpamGuard technology since the IP address of the server appears to be a shared domain mail host and have multiple clients sending email. We will maintain the current information in our database as it is configured. This allows delivery of your mailings to oscillate between the Inbox and the Bulk Mail folder as Yahoo! users choose.

Please keep in mind that our SpamGuard technology will continually monitor user feedback pertaining to emails coming from your mail server(s), and as such, the user feedback we receive will be one of the factors that influence where your emails are most appropriately delivered. Our studies have indicated that when users see messages incorrectly categorized, they notify us within hours of delivery.

If you implement significant changes to your mailing practices, feel free to contact us again. You may refer to the Help page below for some information and general guidelines that we have found to be effective in maintaining good mailing lists:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/bulk/bulk-01.html

Once we have received the above information, we will make every attempt to resolve your concern.

For assistance with delivery issues to Yahoo! Mail, please visit:

http://postmaster.yahoo.com/

Your patience during this process is greatly appreciated.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail.

Regards,
Franc

Thought I´d add my two cents.
I´m appalled to find this post actually started in 2006 and is still going on for over 3 years. Thank you for hosting this website for this long.

We´re from Romania, and most of the general population (read: non-techies) use yahoo mail, mostly because of the uber-popularity of yahoo messenger. So they are not going to move soon (or soon enough).

75 of my massive 100k emailing list is on yahoo mail and they are not getting our newsletters. I´ve been closely monitoring exim (our MTA) for a week now and every single email that is not yahoo.com gets sent. On the other hand, it takes forever to send on yahoo (yes, they clogged my queue with over 70k emails).

I don´t have spf, domain keys, or rDNS (outrageous, i know). I´m going to start with the DNS configs and will keep everyone updated.

Thanks again!

Check your senderscore. I guess yahoo uses this to determine your IP reputation. If you are interested in how yahoo works, I have done a rather detailed write up. Hopefully this will help others.

http://blog.whitesites.com/How-to-get-into-Yahoo-Inbox-with-your-bulk-emails__634023485474062500_blog.htm

This is most unfortunate. You are giving low priority to emails that are very important in nature. Please rethink this practice and try to find a better solution. This could result in Yahoo loosing parts of an otherwise strong customer base.

Today I managed to clear my 10,000 email backlog after weeks of agony.

The deferal error is directly related to the number of connection attempts made to the mail servers.

If you check your mail server logs, the connection is immediately dropped upon connection.

This means that domains keys , reverse points are not relevent for this problem as none of this information is actually sent to the mail servers before the conenction is dropped.

The solution:
The way to clear your backlog is to change your mail server settings so that only 1 message is sent every 20-30 seconds!

I know this is painful but it works :)

Happy mail queue cleansing!

Hi,
nice Article and i got more info for this article and everybody.

this site is useful for us.

For about the past week yahoo has been bouncing all emails from my server. We´re checking to try and determine why, interestingly it´s not the same 451 error message?

Yahoo has been giving me fits for 5 months now. I´ve filled out their stupid forms several times. I can not get thru to a human. I don´t know how old this website is, but it is now November 10, 2010. I have asked all my subscribers to stop using Yahoo. Yahoo sucks!

There appears to have been an incident involving capacity issues within
our delivery infrastructure. The error message "451 Message temporarily
deferred - 4.16.50" indicates that our MTAs are currently experiencing
heavy, unusual traffic. You may retry sending at a later time when you
see this message.

Sweet,

Although it says that they are just experiencing higher than usual volume, this is probably not true. Your IP address has been marked as "suspicious" and it will not go away unless you change your sending habits.

I send one email per day. Three emails a month to my friend at Yahoo. Private emails. One day Yahoo deferred permanently. High traffic from my IP. Absurd.

sweet - What do you mean - ".unless you change your sending habits." Should I stop my bad habit of sending emails?

Most probably their tech team is just not able to manage the system.

Yahoo is very stupid many thanks for resolving my issue

(host a.mx.mail.yahoo.com[67.195.168.31] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.1 [TS03] All messages from 95.110.224.73 will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed. See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts03.html)

Permanent Solution: STOP using any yahoo services. Plus spread the word all over your blogs, customers and friends. Some of my customers are even losing sales and money for not getting their shopping carts to delivery emails to yahoo users. If you still need free services, use google or microsoft. The funny "sarcastically" thing is that yahoo is blocking all of us, legit senders, hosting companies and business people while in my only free yahoo mail I still get about 100 spam messages per day, including those scams from Africa, offering you money or heritage. We have the most powerful/free source in our hands "Internet" and yes we can SHUT Yahoo down very fast and easily. Even Google and Microsoft will be so happy to hear that and all we need is to not visit their sites or use any of their services anymore. One day we might read on wikkipedia: "1111 Message permanently deferred - 4.16.50 Yahoo got permanently banned from cyberspace by its own cybernauts".

I am glad to read your post and to be part of it. I will be back to check more of your post.
top seo firm

I wonder if part of their attempt to thwart new peer servers, their first response is a 5xx. If your MTA tries the next MX, it´s 421, and you´re banned for a few days??

Yahoo is horrible. I just got a message that my email has been deleted due to either 4 months of inactivity or because I aksed for it to be closed. I had 15 years of emails.lots of things I really needed. They said they could not help - it is gone.right out of the blue. Forget the fact that it freezes up due to the ginormous amount of ads they cram at you. Bye forever yahoo.hello google

even better than that is the fact they know i send out lots of mail when i have projects but they picked last night to totally close my access to outgonig email unless you fill out the stupid CAPTCHA b.s. which i did and I still couldn´t those people suck big time then i got cut of from a chat screw them

I´m sick of dealing with this for the past 4 weeks. All my mail domains have been successfully delivering transactional email for the past 16 years and Yahoo decodes now to block them?!?

Please VOTE and comment at Get Satisfaction:

http://getsatisfaction.com/yahoo/topics/mail_from_yahoo_mail_account_holders_have_severe_delivery_delays_or_not_getting_delivered

Yeah i am currently experiencing this problem sux

We have sent over 70000 legitimate e-tickets this week for our client and guess what - yahoo has bounced every one sent to yahoo.com (over 14000 emails) - We have got SPF records, DKIM, ReturnPath registered and every other deliverability measure in place . so next time you travel and don´t receive your e-ticket think twice about blaming the airline!

I give up!

Yahoo is unreliable. I am going through the process of gmail. Good-bye, yahoo, and good riddance.

Here´s a follow-up to my ongoing Yahoo email delivery woes.

- I submitted their PostMaster Support form 8 times over the past 6 months.

- I´ve replied 29 times to their canned email responses.

The end result is I have 3 of my IP addresses that allow delivery to yahoo email addresses and 2 that are still permanently blocked.

I even did an experiment where I sent NO EMAIL for 6 days from one of the IP addresses, yet a single message I sent to my Yahoo email address was rejected yet again at the SMTP handshake level. Meaning, they aren´t even reading the content of the message. It´s a simple permanent block on the IP address.

I also tried switching the IP address for one of the mail sending domains and that was almost immediately blocked as well.

Lastly, I tried for several hours getting someone from the PostMaster group on the phone. Apparently, they don´t have phones or supervisors.

F. Cherry, it would be nice to say "bye Bye Yahoo", but if you have subscribers with Yahoo mail accounts, you don´t have that choice.

Yahoo service RAELLY is bad in numerous ways. I would never suggest using them. on top of their incredibly crappy service the service customer service out of the country giving away more Amercian jobs

It´s now October 2011 and Yahoo is still persisting with their amateur approach to email. What a bunch of losers. No wonder they are losing customers and they are dropping in the search wars. Clients don´t forget how they were treated by this bunch of Yahoos! Soon they will be no more thank goodness. And please everybody, don´t encourage MS to buy them out. It will just encourage these cowboys to continue this practice and could even begin to infect Hotmail. A legal suit has been filed in California against Yahoo by Hollomax.

I have a client that has been sending bulk email from her Yahoo account. Her list has about 50 addresses on it. Not a big list really. Now she is getting "554 Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information" as of 12/15/2011. My best advice to everyone is refuse to support Yahoo users unless they switch to ANY other email service. To paraphrase the Rainman, "Yahoo sucks."

I could tell how great you are in your field of interest. You could relate in each detail very well

Why is Yahoo not allowing me to email articles to people? I get a comment about it being potential spam. It´s an article I found on Yahoo, not spam!

I´ve had an account with yahoo for YEARS. I should not be having email issues while using my apple devises. I am so darn disappointed with yahoo and no I´m not going to use the yahoo app on my devises to access my mail. That is silly.